I installed IE8 on all my PC’s when it was first released, and it ran like a dog.  I have 2 Vista PC’s and a Win 7 RC machine. On all 3 machines, opening IE8 resulted in the first tab ‘Connecting…’ for a very long time (sometimes forever, other times 20 to 30 seconds).

I changed my home page in IE to localhost (running IIS on all machines) to rule out my dodgy wireless internet connection as a factor, and nothing changed – IE’s first tab still hung there trying to connect.

I knew something wasn’t right, so I went to google and read numerous blogs and forums.  None of the suggestions I saw worked.  I tried Managing Add-ons and disabling everything, but still the problem was present.

IE8 on my work PC worked fine though, so I knew it was something to do with my setup at home.

I thought about what all my home PCs had in common that my work PC didn’t, and then it dawned on me that it might be AVG free anti-virus, which was installed on all my home PCs.  I had already tried disabling the AVG ‘Safe Search’ add-on in IE, so I went one step further and disabled LinkScanner in the AVG application.

Still no improvement to my IE8 performance woes.

I then decided to try uninstalling AVG completely.  Good move – after a reboot, IE8 now works as it says on the tin (good enough for the missus and kids, but I’ll stick with Firefox thanks).

I was already getting frustrated with AVG after they recently started regularly popping up a window trying to convince me to upgrade to the paid version.  I have ran avg free for years, but our relationship is now over – nagging me and slowing down my IE means we are through.

So, I am running virus scanner free now until Microsoft Security Essentials gets released.